Beautiful Antonio (37 page)

“You wouldn't have a chance in hell, mother,” said Antonio, trying to jolly her along a bit. “Those chaps have guns and they'd take pot shots at you.”

“And I'd rip their eyes out with these nails!”

“They wouldn't let you near them, mother.”

“I'd get near them somehow all right.
They
wouldn't know I wanted to rip their eyes out, would they? So I'd creep up, I'd creep up, and with this hand… I'd have their eyes out!”

Antonio's spirits drooped. It always happened to him these days. After trying to play the fool he was very soon down in the dumps again. A twinkling of gaiety made him all the more bleakly aware of the gall and wormwood of his habitual state of mind.

“One of these days, my boy,” continued Signora Rosaria, “I want you to pluck up courage and get down to Catania and take a look at the house.”

“I'll do it tomorrow,” replied Antonio, swinging his legs back onto the sofa and stretching out.

Tomorrow came. He didn't budge.

For two whole weeks the sound of the bagpipes which the Scottish troops, billeted in the chemist's house across the way, played day and night every hour on the hour, gave him a kind
of ambiguous and paralysing pleasure… What was Barbara up to all this time? Was there any truth in the rumours circulating about her? The notary in La Punta would have it that she had been raped by a German; his clerk swore she had hopped it with a tommy; the local doctor, a friend of the Di Bronte and Puglisi families, who drove his dog-cart every other day to the village where Barbara and her husband had taken refuge – a reliable witness, therefore – reported that on the contrary the Di Bronte establishment had remained unviolated by both Germans and British, and that Barbara, simply by appearing at the window, had dissuaded a body of the soldiery from continuing to demand admittance with the butts of their rifles.

This image of Barbara appearing on high and causing a gang of obstreperous stevedores from Hamburg or London to come over all lax and listless was the one which most appealed to Antonio, and entirely convinced him. This was the true picture, no doubt about it! This was Barbara to a T. His heart confirmed it by thumping fit to burst whenever he contemplated her in that high-and-mighty attitude.

Towards the end of August he shook off his sloth, had a good stretch, put on his black suit and went down to Catania.

What a scene of desolation! In Via Etnea the rubble from the fine
palazzi,
not yet carted away, lay heaped against what walls still stood; most of the shops were closed, their steel shutters wrenched this way and that by the thieves who attempted to force them nightly; mountains of rubble in every corner, licked by half-hearted flames with only a few flakes of dry orange-peel or a scrap of newspaper to get their teeth into, sent a dense cloud of foul odours up to the top floors and the terraces; the swallows, scared by the gunfire, flew high high up as if over an earth submerged by flood-waters, printing on the depths of the sky hazy symbols of woe; conversely, mosquitoes, attracted by army trucks, refugees, and that mysterious vortex which draws insects into the midst of mankind whenever the latter is at a low ebb, pressed in from La Piana to the heart of
the city, where they injected malaria even into the heaven-flung arms of the impromptu sopranos – a shabby crew – who sang of an evening in the
Teatro Bellini
for the benefit of the troops; half-naked boys, so thin their shoulder-blades stuck out like vestigial wings, roamed the rubbish dumps in search of scraps; here and there among the ruins, gleaming gold, lay the harp-like innards of pianos stripped of their carcasses, and mournfully in dead of night betrayed the presence of thieves who, tiptoeing off with an item of lumber, inadvertently strummed their strings. Matches, meanwhile, were unobtainable, and the lighting of a fire entailed cajoling a provident friend who might well live at the other end of town.

What desolation! Along Via Etnea placards of all sizes gave warning in English: “Look out for VD!”, “Wars end but VD marches on!”, “What'll you take home to your girl? VD?” Half-way down the street a long-established café of honoured name had been done over with a coat of whitewash and fitted out with white screens. Over the doorway an illuminated sign exhorted the troops: “Come along in, but wash first – or at least afterwards!” The Public Gardens were one mass of trucks; at twilight the bombed-out among the townsfolk roamed like ghosts haunting the places where their homes lay buried, and the rooms which only a twelvemonth since had rung with New Year toasts and greetings and exchange of kisses. Others, evicted from their apartments and reduced to bumming off hard-up, nagging relatives, hovered in the streets and squinnied in through windows to see what was afoot in the familiar rooms, and saw – on the wall where once had hung the picture of the Holy Family – a nude woman lewdly scrawled, her eye a revolver-bullet loosed off by some drunken soldier.

The harbour area, where the patrician mansions of Catania stand cheek by jowl with working-class dwellings, was fenced off with barbed wire and out of bounds to all civilians – it had been requisitioned as quarters for the hefty but homesick negro troops, some one of whom might occasionally be seen standing at a window, his evicted landlady's hat on his head and her
boa round his neck. The old inhabitants of the neighbourhood, rich and poor alike, craned over the barbed wire, peering with all their might, launching the consolation of despair towards their old homes which had fallen, as they put it, into the hands of the Cannibals.

If bricks and mortar were in a state of devastation, no less so were feelings. Resentment was rife between this family and that: greetings unreturned, disdainful glances, political denunciations, had conferred an even more beleaguered air on the buildings still left standing, as if they had been rudely and spitefully slammed shut in each other's faces. The erstwhile Bullies, now deprived of an outlet, were so jaundiced by the poison pent up in them that they couldn't cast a kindly look even on their own children.

And of those who had suffered under them, woe alas, how many were broken by all this! Benevolent old Avvocato Bon-accorsi barricaded himself in his flat and refused to admit his friends, who had begun to get on his nerves. Dressed in black, armed with a handkerchief and seated in front of a mirror as if to console himself with the sight of a man of grief, he wept day in day out. Thus, while some who had beaten up their neighbours, imprisoned or even killed them, went about brazen and insolent, scheming vendettas or putting them into practice, this gentle soul, always on the side of reason and never harming anyone, racked with compassion for his fellow men, had not the courage to show his face in the street.

On the other side of the coin was Engineer Marletti. Appointed mayor of the city, he strutted up and down Via Etnea – dusty and deafening with military convoys – his aquiline nose stuck in the air, pretending not to recognize many an acquaintance and replying (a cheerful smile, a wave of the hand) only to the greetings of the new bullyboys. His authority, it turned out, was nothing to write home about. For one evening a party of drunken British officers caught him off guard on his own doorstep, solemnly declaiming a list of those citizens who were to be permanently deprived of civil rights.

They bundled him into a jeep and whisked him off to an ancient palazzo where, among the leftovers of a banquet, they made him wash up a monumental stack of dishes.

Avvocato Ardizzone was obsessed by a terror as grave and solemn as the airs he formerly put on. One afternoon he dragged some artist fellow along to the Bar Association and there, taking advantage of the fact not a soul was about at that hour of day, had him smother the Fascist symbol on which he was leaning in his portrait with some very thorough brush-work. His likeness, as a result, was left suspended in the void. Unfortunately, be it the fault of the inferior pigment or the work of some ill-wisher, two days later the fasces reappeared, surrounded by a blood-red smudge. An unknown voice came to him over the wire: “Avvocato, the fasces is back again!”

“I don't understand. Kindly explain yourself.”

“The fasces in your portrait – it's back again, large as life!”

“I am an honest man and have nothing to fear!”

“I know you're an honest man, but some malicious tongue might…”

“What do you advise me to do?”

“Remove the picture.”

“No, no, that would worsen the situation. Who knows what they might not think?… For example… for example that I had once had my photograph taken with that Heinous Criminal, the author of all our misfortunes. Do you understand me, my dear, kind friend, whose name I regret not knowing, but whom I none the less thank from the bottom of my heart?”

“If that is the case, do as you think best.”

The avvocato thereupon became delirious, and on several occasions, hearing a knocking at the street door and imagining it to be the British military police with their red tops and white webbing, such was his state of mindless terror that he tried to climb to the terrace and hurl himself down into the street below.

*

Antonio got himself down to Catania during the morning, and having no wish to do the length of Via Etnea, where he was more than likely to bump into people altered not only in expression but even in the way they walked, he took a narrow side-turning leading from Via Umberto to his home street. Here his eye fell on a door he knew; which is to say that with a sinking of the heart he noticed, laid athwart a ditch that had yawned open all along the housefronts, a very familiar door now acting as a bridge between the street and a small entrance. A few steps further and he saw the leaf of another familiar door on the ground, serving the same purpose, this time still more recognizable – since it bore the name “Antonio” scratched with the point of a nail in the stiff, upright handwriting he had had as a ten-year-old; and before the alley opened into Via Pacini, lo, a third door similarly placed, the oldest old door in his building, covered with muddy footprints and smashed almost to smithereens under the strain.

“God, the house must be completely flattened!” thought Antonio in panic as he turned the corner.

But the building was still standing. The metal entrance-doors had been hoisted off their hinges, however, and sagged against the door-jamb, immovable. He turned sharply in under the archway. Rubble and wreckage of every sort, pulverized window-panes and mirrors, great mounds of rags and refuse. At the foot of the main staircase, on the step of the porter's lodge, the old caretaker himself, dazed by the horror of events, sat staring blindly into space.

“Don Sebastiano,” cried Antonio, “How are things with you?”

The caretaker groped around for Antonio's hand, and having grasped it drew it close to his eyes, then burst into tears.

“They even come pissing right in under here!” he sobbed. “And if I dare say a word it's the worse for me! Come barking into my face like butchers' curs, they do.”

“How about our flat? Is it damaged?”

“Not a bomb has fallen here, Master Ninuzzo, but it does seem as the thieves has grown wings these days!”

“Why couldn't you have slept up there yourself?”

“I could never have made the stairs, Master Ninuzzo.”

“Give us the keys then, will you?”

“My niece's up there, cleaning around a bit.”

Antonio took the stairs two at a time, passing a number of unfamiliar figures on their way down from somewhere he didn't care to imagine, possibly his own home…

“Where d'you think
you're
off to?” said one. “Don't you know the maid's up there?”

“Son of a bitch,” muttered Antonio, elbowing the man roughly aside and sprinting up still faster.

From the doorway of his old home issued a cloud of dust as dense as smoke from sodden logs, and in the thick of it swished a broomstick forcefully wielded.

“Leave off a moment, can't you!” panted Antonio as he reached the landing.

The caretaker's niece came to the open door, beating the dust from her broom, and stood in puzzlement. She was fifty or thereabouts, dwarf-like in stature but straight and strong and full of pep, with one rosy cheek and the other entirely covered by a birth-mark the colour of wine-lees.

“…I'm the owner here,” explained Antonio.

“Oh, Signor Don Alfio!” shrilled the woman, steadying herself with one hand on the broom-handle while she dropped a deep curtsey.

“Signor Alfio was my father. He's dead. I'm Antonio.”

“Oh, oh, Signor Don Ninuzzo!” she cried, more than ever eager to be of assistance. “I'll be off and tidy your bedroom what's all of a mess. If you did but know the job it is to keep an eye on these pesky thieves! Why, they're here every minute of the day claiming they're cops, or Brits, or Yanks, or the devil knows what.”

This said, she leant her broom against the wall and bustled off down the passage. Antonio closed the apartment door, the
only one in the place still on its hinges, and followed in her wake; but at the sight of his father's study he was overcome by a weariness he hadn't been aware of till that very moment. He flopped down on the sofa, which no longer jangled, the reason being that the back was now denuded of knick-knacks and white with dust. He propped his head on the wooden arm-rest and, letting his eye slowly roam, drank in the portraits, looking sadder now, the sagging curtains, the doorless apertures, the smashed window providing a fine view of the caved-in roof of a neighbouring building all bristling with beams. From the street came unremitting whiffs of stench and clouds of dust and the birdlike acrobatics of half-charred paper. Oh, the pity of it, the pity of it…

A voice from the far end of the passage, unexpected, a breathless voice: “Antonio! Hey Antonio! Where are you?”

The sound of footsteps in the passage, hesitant and slow at first, then picking up speed, and in came a man whom the years had once respected, laying scarcely a finger on him, and then only to caress him, but for whom now they seemed to have lain in ambush on a dark night and bastonaded with sudden wrath and rancour, leaving no part of him unscathed by the daily castigation meted out to him.